Ben, in the World. Doris Lessing
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slept. Ben slept. In the morning they ate fruit and more fruit at the hotel breakfast, and then they took their things and went to the flat Alex had rented, in a street not far from the sea front. In the lift Alex explained their flat was on 3 – not too high up: Ben still didn’t like lifts. Two good-sized rooms, bedrooms, separated by a larger room that was the sitting room. A kitchen, not large; bathroom with shower and lavatory. Ben was to have his own room. Alex thought this was possibly dangerous, but he needed a room to himself: for one thing, he had a girlfriend here, Teresa. This was the first room Ben had had to himself since he had been at home with his family, and he was instinctively looking for bars in the windows: no bars. But he was feeling confined: kept testing the door – yes, he could go out and come back, he had a key. This was no trap… But this room, with its single bed, the big windows, was like the room he had when he was a child. It was midday. Alex said he was jet-lagged and Ben thought this meant Alex was ill: he himself did not remember being ill. Alex went to his room, saying there would be a lot of people coming around later, and that when he woke he would take Ben out and they would buy food to prepare in the kitchen. Ben was restless in his room… looked down into the street from where he could just hear voices talking that slushy language… looked across at windows opposite, where he could see people moving about there, but not know what they did. He went to the sitting room. There were some magazines there, but pictures and photographs were always of kinds of people that were not his friends, and he knew could never be. I want to go home, he was repeating, silently, in his head. Home, home.
To test if he was a prisoner he let himself out, managed to remain calm in the old, noisy lift, walked to the end of the street and back. Not many people in this side street. They all looked at him, and one followed, a young boy with a sharp angry face. Ben did not run – he knew better, but returned fast to the building where his room and safety were, and waited at the lift knowing the boy was creeping in behind him, staring, in a crouch Ben understood very well. He must not turn and grip that boy by the shoulders… The lift rattled down as the boy had almost reached him – what did he want? – and Ben was in the lift, and then fitting his key into the flat door, which opened, and Alex was there. ‘Oh, there you are… I was wondering… ’ Alex smiled, but Ben knew he had not liked finding Ben gone. Then Alex asked if he wanted to go back to the pavement outside the hotel where the tables were, and Ben said yes, he would. They sat there eating sandwiches and drinking juice, watching people of all colours, black and brown and pale brown and white, go wandering past. A lot of girls, some of them with hardly any clothes on. There were girls at these tables, sometimes in pairs, or by themselves. Ben could not stop himself watching them, and wanting. He was thinking of Rita, and how she liked him. Alex told him to be careful, because the girls usually had men who protected them. ‘Like Johnston,’ Ben said, adding another ingredient to Alex’s view of this Johnston. ‘Did he take her money?’ he asked. ‘She never asked me for money,’ said Ben. ‘She liked me.’ ‘I think you’d find these girls would ask for quite a lot of money.’ All that went along well, sitting there under the umbrellas, watching the people, Alex sometimes greeting friends, and then Alex bought food, and Ben helped him carry it all back to their place. Alex cooked, and Ben said he could help, he knew how to cook – but he was thinking of the toast and porridge and bits of this and that he had made for the old lady, and soon saw this was more difficult cooking. Ben sat in the living room, smelling the aromas of spices and hot meat, and then in came a lot of people, and he watched them all kissing and hugging and holding each other; and talking and chattering, their teeth flashing and gleaming. The light had gone outside. This was a different night from the ones in Nice: it was hot, and slow, with sometimes a strong smell of sea. Some of these people were the same as last night’s, but to each newcomer Alex said, ‘This is Ben, we are going to make a film together.’ And as they said, ‘Como vai?’, ‘Welcome’, ‘Hello’, each gave him the surprised curious look he knew, and then they were careful not to look, or he caught them staring, hoping he wouldn’t notice. The food came in, piled on platters, a lot of it, and wine was in every glass and bottles of wine stood about the room. There was such a noise, such a clamour of voices, and Ben did not understand much of what was said, even when they spoke English. There were plans being made, and he was in them. The talk, the eating, the drinking, went on till late.
Ben slept lightly in that room which made him think of his old home, and woke early. He did not dare go out into the street for fear of another killer boy, stalking him. He ate fruit, he stood at windows looking out. Alex did not get up till late, and when he came into the sitting room Teresa was with him: Ben had failed to notice that this female had gone with Alex into his room last night.
But she was friendly, and helpful, making food for him, offering him juice, and when he sat silent and doleful included him in what she said, in her quick, but difficult English. ‘What do you think about it, Ben?’ ‘Would you like that, Ben?’ ‘What do you want me to get you?’ He liked her very much, but knew she belonged to Alex.
And so the days went, slowly, and Ben slept a lot, from boredom. The evenings were full of people, who arrived loudly, laughing and talking to each other in Portuguese but to Alex and Ben in their hard-to-understand English. They sometimes brought food, not always. Ben sat apart and watched. He was trying to understand why when they were all so different, they could so easily be together, as if they did not know how different they were. Mostly they had smooth darkish skins, and dark eyes, contrasting with Alex, who was pale, a thin, thin-boned man, with pale hair, and his clothes were pale blue, trousers and shirts, or white. Over the eyes were brushes of short fair hair, but the face said Alex was not as young as he wanted to seem: the eyes had wrinkles under them. He was forty, five years more than Ben’s passport said he was. No one who came to this place was as young as Ben really was, eighteen. Though that was confusing to think about: he knew he did not look like one of their eighteen-year-olds: he did not have that young face. Yet whenever he thought about his age, how he was, he remembered the old woman’s, ‘You’re a good boy, Ben.’
Teresa was a tall young woman, with a big bottom and big breasts, but her waist was small, clinched with a belt to show it off. She had black hair, loose to her shoulders. Her eyes were dark. She was always smiling, laughing, and her voice was soft and easy on Ben’s feelings. She put her arms around Alex, around people who came in, and, too, around Ben. ‘Dear Ben,’ she said often, hugging him, making him want to do what he knew he must not. But no one else touched him. Only Teresa came inside the distance all the others set between them and him. Only Teresa would take his hand, swing it, drop it; squeeze his big shoulders and say, ‘Oh, your shoulders, what shoulders, Ben,’ or put her arm around him as she stood talking to someone.
A man who came often was Paulo, who had worked with Alex before. They were writing a script for this film about Ben, but not always in the flat. The two might sit for a while at the table in the sitting room, talking, not looking at Ben, while Teresa tidied up the place, or cooked something, or sat on a chair-arm swinging her legs, watching the men, or reading the magazines, or sometimes singing. Then the men went out and Ben knew it was because they found his presence there wrong for what they were doing, or thinking. He knew that the story was changing all the time, because Brazil was not like the north: Ben knew now he had come from the north. Paulo was different in every way from Alex, being large, with soft brown flesh, big brown eyes, dark hair, and little fat hands with rings on them. Paulo wanted to please Alex, Ben knew: they all did. Alex was the one they all turned to, watched; they waited to hear what he thought.
Sometimes on those evenings there were as many as fifteen or twenty people for supper. Every day Alex bought a lot of food, and Teresa and he cooked it. Ben heard Teresa arguing with Alex about feeding so many people, some of them he did not even know, but they came because they knew there would be food. He always said, ‘Sure, come in, sit down, what’ll you drink, you’re welcome.’
‘You talk like my wife, Teresa, now shut up,’ said Alex.
When he had been here before, working on the play, he had a flat like this one, and the cast and their friends spent free time with him and he fed them. This happens with Americans, or, for that matter, with anyone who has more money than others, who are often poor, like most of the people who came to this flat, actors, dancers, singers in work or out of it, and it was natural for Alex to feed them, and often find reasons to